(NOTE: This exercise in blatant self-disclosure was written in April/May 2000 for a course called Humanities Research Colloquium, undertaken near the end of my doctoral studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). The instructor, Bahman Shirazi, Ph.D., was also the chair of my doctoral committee.)
Intro: Compassionate Languaging
Certain complex
words that we need to “grok”[1]
for purposes of this paper beg for simplicity.
Consider the following: “heuristic” (self-experiencing), “hermeneutics”
(meaning-making), “epistemology” (the nature of knowledge), “ontology”
(the nature of reality or being), “phenomena” (the pre-interpretive
experiencing of things as they appear), “phylogeny” (evolutionary
development), “morphogenic” (subtle meta-energies), “tacit knowing,”
(a connecting-up, revelatory knowing), “presentiate” (make present), and
“integral” (gestalt being). There
could be richer, fuller definitions of these words. In fact, as this paper proceeds so might the
meanings of these definitions swell in our understanding from their contextual
embeddedness.
Just as
“[l]anguage is a cage,”[2] so
the world is our prison-house. Described
also as an island[3] or a
cave,[4]
the sphere of human drama revolves around eternally cycling patterns of action
and reflection. Consider living cells,
our roundish heads, “social circles,” the routine of daily, seasonal and
physiological cycles occurring in endless, open, inter-related loops on a
planetary orb. Thus has humanity seen
fit to dub the circle as sacred, mysterious.
And when dimensional layers, such as morphogenic fields
(manifesting, e.g., as “auras”) combine with cosmological resonances emanating
from a rhythmically pulsing universe (manifesting, e.g., as the “aurora
borealis”), circles become spheres become phenomena infused with subtle
energies that can escape the empirical grasp yet may also leave “psychic
imprints” on our intuition, stimulating our tacit knowing.
The above
rumination has just used language to describe an ontology of the human
condition; it has risked the creation of a languaging cage in order to connect
readers to the writer’s heuristic hermeneutics. As one ontological conception among
many possibilities, the resulting epistemology might be packaged and
dogmatized and used as the basis for a new scientific discipline or
methodology, or sacralized as a religion.
And if our cultural human phylogeny has demonstrated anything it
is the human tendency to reduce sets of ideas to a static doctrine and sector
this off from the systemic, holistic embeddedness and integral being and
becoming of those ideas. That is, a form
of idolatry takes place whenever the message and the messenger are
institutionalized and effectively worshipped, as the institution becomes
further estranged from the essence of both.
Enter the cage.
But instead of a
cage, this prison-house world can become a research tool for rediscovering the
abundance of the fabulous; through the “shamanic trace” left in ancient mounds,[5] in
pre-historic petroglyphic symbols and arrangements of ancient stone monoliths
we might discern the same wish of humanity to preserve for successive
generations, a representation of some enigmatic Truth. It is this same tacit drive of
humanity toward discovering the esoteric that urges us to study the art,
architecture and the linguistic clues left in the literature of classical
antiquity and subsequent civilizations.
Likewise, I believe that a tacit knowing is guiding the creation
of this paper. Yet language remains as
the great interlocutor for human (mis)interpretation and
(mis)understanding. Language is the hermeneutic
tool used, whether in printed or spoken form, to presentiate in modern
parlance phenomena that have always manifested across time and space while
“immanently transcending” both. The
challenge of reading and hearing language is how to constantly remind ourselves
of its representative nature. And with
constancy we might not then fall into the profane abyss of concretizing,
literalizing and making fundamentalist idols through languaging. Language, as interlocutor, holds the keys to
the cage: keys that can keep us there or free us from it. Those keys can jangle for eternity in our own
pockets as we pace the floor of our prison-house world in blind,
self-righteous, closed-loop contentment.
As a dualist image,
even the foregoing language can be dangerous in that it may preserve the
spatio-temporal illusion of a recurring, phylogenic “inside” ignorance
and an “outside” enlightenment that we can ontogenetically[6]
recreate through contemplating such metaphoric bifurcations as cages/ caves/
islands, versus freedom/ light or unboundedness. Let us consider these to be polar complements
rather than opposing dualities. Concepts
constructed through such imagery, as with all stories and parables, are needed
for human comprehension. But images,
like the words that formed them, possess many levels of meaning, and neither
should be mistaken for actual “experience.”[7] This is the thrust of what I hope to convey
in this foray into heuristic research.
Hence, it is by experiencing this written piece that the readers’ own
experiential perceptions are gleaned and gathered and re-represented. As a writer I hope to disclose my own
experience in a way that has integrated life’s perceptions so that when
shared in this way the reader is left with a feeling that he or she is not
alone,[8]
that I am connecting to some universal human experience with infinitely diverse
contextual manifestations. To succeed at
connecting with the reader, the language, besides containing enough “imagistic
anchors” for human comprehension, must strive toward compassionate
communication. It must come from a place
of caring dialogue, not an ego-driven, didactic monologue of impenetrably
turgid and pedantic prose. The job of
the writer is to artfully craft thoughts into words, into thoughtfully
communicative self-disclosure. That is,
it is “the act of making yourself manifest, showing yourself so that others can
perceive you…disclosing the self as a way to facilitating disclosure from
others.”[9] And in heuristic methodology, the self is so
inextricably bound up with the investigation one might say the self is the
“Petri dish” for the research, which in turn is an organic part of a
contextualized and situated, uncertain self.
The integration process is prompted by dialogically communicative
writing (or speaking-to) wherein the question and response are internalized, as
in self-dialogue; the difference is only that the “self of other” steps into
the shoes of the “self’s self.” Yet how
much “other” is the writer for the reader when it is the reader who is silently
reading along, making the meaning (through his or her own experience) while
experiencing the text?
Heuristic Research Methodology
Doing research
is to do “a disciplined, rigorous, systematic investigation.” And methodology means “a plan for
obtaining knowledge and understanding phenomena.” Using a heuristic research methodology is
to follow a process of internal search involving self-dialogue with a
phenomenon during which self-awareness and self-knowledge grow along with the
nature and meaning of presentiating the overall experience.
Clark Moustakas,
in his seminal work, Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology, Application,[10]
sets forth the appropriate framework:
- Initial Engagement: discovering a passionate question that begs to be researched; requires an inward reaching for tacit knowledge;
- Immersion: once defined, the researcher “lives the question in waking, sleeping, and even dream states”;
- Incubation: retreating from intense focus and allowing answers to develop on their own accord;
- Illumination: a breakthrough of qualities and themes inherent in the question into conscious awareness that adds new dimensions, corrects distorted understandings or discloses hidden meanings, e.g., new awareness, a modification of an old understanding, synthesis of fragmented knowledge or a novel discovery;
- Explication: the researcher sets out the meaning of the phenomenon in question; attends to one’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and judgments, while also being in conversation with others toward a “comprehensive depiction of dominant themes”;
- Creative Synthesis: achieved through intuitive and tacit powers; involves synthesizing the core themes into narrative and perhaps other creative depictions.[11]
Concepts used within this
framework of heuristic research are:
Self-dialogue (akin to Jung’s active imagination process),
Tacit Knowing
(revelations from an interplay of subsidiary and focal perceptual elements
comprising the whole of a phenomenon; underlying all other concepts in
heuristic research)
Intuition (“a
kind of bridge…formed between the implicit knowledge inherent in the tacit and
the explicit knowledge that is observable and describable...In intuition, from
the subsidiary or observable factors one utilizes and internal capacity to make
inferences and arrive at a knowledge of underlying structures and
dynamics…Intuition makes possible the perceiving of things as wholes.”[12]
Indwelling
(turning inward to seek a deeper understanding; crucial for elucidating the
parameters and details of the experience)
Focusing (an
inner attention or staying with in a sustained process of systematically
contacting the more central meaning of an experience to reveal the core
constituent themes of an experience)
Internal Frame of
Reference (the worldview or meaning perspective through which the
researcher derives knowledge, whether it is attained through tacit, intuitive
or observed phenomena)[13]
With all of this theory in mind, I thought I might engage in the process. I am doing so with a great sense of excitement because I think that, in a loose way, the heuristic approach toward integration has been the guiding modus operandi that I had long ago stumbled upon by myself and have followed throughout my life -- I just never had a name for it. In an intuitive way I have struggled to “just do” stuff, become immersed in it and then tried to “make sense of” it as I went along.
The
Question: My Dissertation Proposal
What has precipitated a quandary for me is my current need to develop a dissertation proposal. And what I wish to research and write about in this paper is the “big question” that seems to underlie all of my writings to date. Maybe I could title my dissertation, "A Life of Heuristic Non-Integration Seeking Integration." In this respect, my naturo-heuristic way has engaged in a number of different ways on a number of different questions or issues:
* the CIIS experience
* the art of writing that contextualizes the writer, is experiential and laden with both abstract concepts and imagistic prose
* the "failing to establish one, defined career identity" phenomenon
* making room for "the abnormative and abnormative thinking" as another accommodation to diversity
* collaborative learning and challenging the paradoxes of organizations and group life
* the world as peopled by a race of dissociatives: the pathos of a consensual reality that is reinforced through culture trance
* self-knowledge/ self-realization/ enlightenment: (by whatever name) the prerequisite preparing-of-oneself for penetrating, doing compassionate battle with and transforming elites
* seeking trans-integration: the evolution of structures of mind and the development of self within the dominant Western paradigm
* seeking integration through alternative realities:
1) the way of nature and the aboriginal animist
2) meditational contemplative paths
3) kundalini
4) psychedelics and holotropic breathwork
* the co-evolution of mental consciousness and the Western legal tradition: symbiotic stimuli toward the mental rational
* healing the Western legal tradition by application of non-traditional law school curricula that introduces structures of mind and transpersonal theory
* founding DA (Dissociatives Anonymous): a global organization modeled on AA wherein each begins by the admission, "My name is ___ and I am a dissociative!"
* the heuristic research methodology: toward an integral mind-set
* a comparative study of Ken Wilber's structuralism and Edgar Morin's systemicism: two stylistic conceptions of context, situatedness and uncertainty
* blues and the life of a bluesman: improvising on the scruffiness of simplicity in the key of authenticity
* "the gadfly in a jar of molasses" phenomenon: provocation toward critical thinking as both prompt to others and self-immolation
* how to organize a pile of writings from a pile of old shit into a pile of hot Ph.D. poop, and thence into a best-selling, transitional, climactic or formative text (W.I. Thompson's Coming Into Being[14] referents for seminal works) by Jonathan Goose
_________________
In
looking these over, how wonderful it would be to determine the overriding theme
here and make these chapters in my dissertation, a kind of "life odyssey
memorialized." In other
words, my question of overwhelming concern is:
What is the big underlying question of my life that has been
struggling to come out of my studies and writings?
In looking over
the above extrapolations, I might conclude that I am back again at the same old
question: "in what context can I heuristically do my dissertation
topic?" The answer to that is a
generalist, gestalt-ish, big picture-ism
“I'd-like-to-write-about-my-life's-odyssey-as-being-a-tackling-of-self-identity-through-transformation-in-each-of-the-above-contexts.” That was my meaning in the preceding
paragraphs (in case anyone missed it).
Just as a
professional sax player (and math teacher) at CIIS, Ph.D. candidate Louis
Jordan, writes about improvisation being a reaction to his environment,
manifesting mostly (but by no means only) in his music -- my improvisation too
is spread out over a life. My
improvisation is one of trying different lines of work and other involvements,
such as my piano playing or my gadfly style or certain trains of thought I sit
with and work with over long periods of time.
It is no different really than what I see Louis having done in his
dissertation. He calls it improvisation;
I call it "transformation-through-informed immersion" in which
experiential engagement with one’s socio-cultural ecology is inescapable.
As I think back
on my own experiences, I began wondering recently what kind of methodology
legal research is. You start with legal
and factual issues, a few of them. You
think about them from many different angles.
You consider the law. The law
comes from many sources, e.g., statutes and regulations, common law, case
precedent. The law you find in your
researching of the texts can be in a few different forms. It can be on-point and controlling case law;
non-controlling analogous law that may or may not be on-point; public policy,
etc. You then, in effect, follow the
heuristic method: initial engagement, immersion, incubation, illumination,
explication and finally, creative synthesis.
One could say that a seasoned, improvising jazz musician follows this
path in less than a heartbeat. A lawyer
does too -- in much more than a heartbeat (and often with little or no heart)
-- when researching and preparing a case.
In law school we
are trained to approach things this way:
What are the facts? What are the issues? What is the law? Give your
analysis and show how the facts are in accord with the prevailing law. If not,
show how your set of facts and/or issues can be distinguished so that the
adverse party's contention about the controlling law does not apply.
When making your
case, you creatively assemble things toward a desired outcome. Granted, having and working toward a desired
outcome is not in accord with heuristic methodology. Yet legal research would be in accord from
the standpoint of passionately wishing to answer a question of great
concern. The assemblage of a lawyer’s
case comes from, in effect, reconstructing many historical moments -- framers
of statutes collaboratively engaged with one another to draft a law; or, in
case law, each similar case has its own story by way of facts and interpretive
analysis that attach to it. The case law
method is one of a threaded history through which the law evolves. It's a kind of written oral
history. It can also be a creative
synthesis of "neither nor," i.e., of the party's stances being
"polar complementarities," so that one can introduce a “case of first
impression” (limited only by the many imaginative ways the lawyer tries to
assemble it in that way, without being too flaky so the judge can stay with him
or her in the analysis).
So I can see
legal research as a kind of heuristic research methodology. I also see my natural way in life as
heuristically oriented (in a much less "formal" structure of
course). I grab hold of an idea or make
a choice, stay with it until some light bulb goes off; I talk it over with
others; I write about it; and eventually I synthesize my special meaning and
integrate that into my meaning perspective, always trying to see how some new
discovery has its interrelated place in my evolving continuum of knowledge.
In this regard,
I believe that I always tended to “integrate-without-integrating” by: refusing
to specialize into one, defined career; focusing on the "lusting after the
things that oppress us" notion; my experiencing of CIIS; internalizing
collaborative/ transformative learning and the paradoxes of group life, my
abnormativity, and my music and writing reflecting this. Each of the strings I have followed during my
doctoral work shows this -- HOT/CAST how-groups-learn and grow stuff;
dissociation; structures of mind and the evolution of consciousness; the
indigenous and a new universe story; the many paths toward integration; the
legal tradition: transforming it/ its relation to the mental/rational and the
humanities; community-engaged spirituality...and so on.
The context is
my whole life, but especially over the past dozen years or so. My point here is that if, in fact, I have had a
lifetime of effectively working in the heuristic mode, I might have the kind of
facility with it that a jazz musician has when improvising. So, in trying to develop a dissertation
proposal, I might be able to heuristically bring something to fruition more
quickly than is the norm for the neophyte using this methodology.
As a
dissertation proposal, how does this sound?: "maintaining a fluid
self-identity by way of a ceaseless transforming of one's life through informed
immersion." The CONTEXT is each
of the above extrapolations, SITUATED in an UNCERTAIN life.
Each of the
terms above must be “unpacked.” What is
“self-identity” and how does one distinguish a “fluid” self-identity from a “static”
one? What is this phenomenon of
“transformation”? Is it really a
“ceaseless” process? How so? Why?
What is “informed immersion”?
Immersion into what? How does one
immerse oneself into something?
Heuristic
research tells us that we immerse ourselves in our question, living it in
waking, sleeping and dream states. To be
informed is to be able to access ontological states through the consciousness
of the age (the mental/rational) and our other ways of knowing, and then to be
able to somehow articulate them. So
“informed immersion” can be roughly construed as “holistically engendering
experience.” It has always been my
contention that such informed immersion is the bedrock upon which successive
layers of the self are discovered. The
congealing of the self into a “self-identity” should ideally never be
completed. Rather, it should be thought
of as a “completing” project. In this
way it is a “ceaseless” process. And
this ceaseless process is one of attaining an ever-deepening and expanding
discovery of reality; it is a gradual awareness of a confluence of the “inner”
world and the “outer” world, self and other, subjective and objective. The steps along the way of such a process can
be thought of as “transformations.” Each
new discovery – which in the heuristic approach is really a “rediscovery” – is
an illumination. With each new
illumination, we are able to move closer to a syncretized, dynamic ontological
state (known as self-knowledge, self-realization or enlightenment) that is
intuited through self-dialogue and the tacit knowing dance between the
subsidiary and focal perceptual elements.
The epistemology here can be described as an expanding open-ended
collage of self-identity through exploration of direct experience. It is an ever-developing, immanent gnosis
that ascends in the form of everyday love.
It is an emergent manifestation of spirituality, age-old but
contemporary, at once paradoxical and balanced, absurd and beautiful. And one immerses oneself into every action
and non-actionized subtler state of mind by forever yearning, by hard work that
uses some discipline or injunction, by constancy in observing and being
sensitive to one’s self and all that enters one’s self, by a tenacious,
persevering and loving fortitude, by exercising courage and taking risks, by
failing yet realizing that “the sun also rises” and starting over if need be,
and by just trying to do your best while always knowing you can do better. Maybe, then, we can try to “live and practice
therapy” in our everyday lives, always remembering to Be Not Content.[15]
Periodic Cycles of Incubation/Illumination Starting in the 1970s
Following a
pattern of recreational inebriant use that began in the late 60s when I was a
junior in high school in 1971, I experienced a paranoid-psychotic break from
culture trance-induced consensual reality.
In common parlance, I had a nervous breakdown. I had been trying to escape a half-baked,
dissociative, adolescent, angst-ridden self in the midst of the transitional
societal malaise of that historical time.
Within a family that had no capacity to understand me, and not having
access to anyone else who seemed capable of understanding me, I was adrift in a
scary awareness I could not comprehend.
During this time my mother had started to exhibit symptoms of her
Alzheimer’s disease (that was to finally claim her in 1982) and my family was
undergoing a problematic adaptation to this break in the family structure. What I had experienced in my inebriation and
resulting mental impairment was a world of new, esoteric realities that were
infused with wonder, enchantment, mystery, exploration, strange ecstasies. Compared to the LBJ/Nixonian consensual
reality of the time it was far richer, insightful and meaningful than that
“straight” world. But I could not
function as I was expected to function.
It was a disorienting dilemma,[16]
which is an expression meaning “a trigger to self-examination.” In 1971 my family convinced me to check into
a hospital psych ward.
Between 1971 and
1977 there would be four more breaks, three of which I spent as an in-patient
for an average three-week period of “recovery.”
This included a break in 1976 while being an enlisted man in the U.S.
Navy. They insisted that I spend time in
“observation” while they processed my honorable discharge for “medical
reasons.” Recovery would consist of
being medicated, usually with thorazine or other psychotropic medicaments, as
prescribed. The psych ward activities
would include group meetings and various psychotherapies. I would normally emerge in a sort of
vegetative state, bereft of wonder and the enchantment of life previously
treasured in my less socially acceptable state.
Each time I managed to piece myself back together somehow and move along
in life.
In 1978, on the
“ten-year plan” through undergraduate school, I left home for Loyola University
in New Orleans. In early 1979, having abandoned most
inebriants except alcohol and before I graduated in 1981, I experienced a
recurrence of my prior impairment. This
time I managed to keep it controlled enough so that in-patient “care” was
avoided and I got myself back into functional form. I attribute my self-recovery to three factors:
being away from the influence of my family, having a routine study program and
enjoying a significant relationship with a caring woman.
This chronic
immersion into the abnormative, concurrent with a retreat from an abnormative
focus that might be typified as incubation, was closely followed by small
illuminative gains. I came to
realizations about the fragility and superficiality of self in a world that
seemed to be populated by beings who were in a functionally contented delusion
known popularly as “happiness.” I
slogged on.
In 1985, I
started law school. The analytical skills
acquired here were balanced by a series of further disorienting dilemmas toward
the end of law school in 1988. I had
been clerking in one of the biggest law firms in Baltimore and was engaged to be married to a
woman who was attending law school with me, when my life seemed to start
meeting with a number of dead ends. My
fiancé was a hugely successful, type-A personality and I found myself to be
inadequate in getting onto law review, publishing a law review article, being
retained by my employer as a lawyer, etc.
I also began questioning her love for me and concluded, by way of a
number of experiences, that she did not truly love me. I called off the engagement. But, although I immediately regretted the
decision, for her it was in irretrievable one.
Thus began about two years of a painful re-evaluation and re-adaptation
to or reconstructing of my life.
After law school
I was accepted by the U.S. Army JAG Corps and began my career as a JAGC
officer. However, in my application I
neglected to inform them of having had any previous psychiatric treatment. I had just completed a course in Psychology
and the Law. The professor was adamant
about not revealing any past psychiatric care, as this would arouse deep
discriminatory suspicion in any future employer. This professor was an ex-Navy SEAL. After my consultation with him, in which I
divulged my intention to apply without revealing my mental health history, he
affirmed my intended action saying that they would likely “not look behind any
prior honorable discharge.” I had noted
my past Navy service on my application, explaining my early release as a
“hardship” (which has a technical military definition, but which I meant in a
more colloquial sense).
After five
months into my service as a JAGC officer assigned to an office in Korea, the
U.S. Army investigatory arm, the CID, discovered my past, undisclosed
psychiatric history. This led to a kind
of comedy of tragic errors. I was
reassigned from Korea to a
Medical Holding Company at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) in Washington, D.C. They promptly ordered me into a psych ward
for “observation.” In spite of the fact
that, according to an examining psychiatrist at 8th Army, Korea,
that I had little or no residual symptoms of my past impairment, I was obliged
to undergo “treatment” as part of my course of “observation.” I quickly retained counsel and he objected to
any medication being administered without a finding of some manifest
symptomology (of which there was none).
I found myself in a “Catch-22” situation; if I admitted to pathology and
accepted some form of treatment, I would be incompetent to serve/ if I refused
to admit to some sort of pathology I was “in denial” and incompetent to serve
as a result. In this tenuous position, I
still fought them at every turn. The
U.S. Army was preparing a medical board to determine my fitness to serve. In the meantime, I was discharged and
reassigned to the JAG office at WRAMC.
Here I performed my duties in an exemplary manner, even interacting with
psych ward personnel in my representative capacity as Army lawyer for other
soldiers.
The medical
board process dragged on for seventeen months, during which I was living and
working under this cloud of suspicion and indecision. I paid heavily for my defense, both in terms
of money and emotional investment.
Finally, I was due to go before a board of three officers who would
determine my fitness based on the medical and factual evidence. Just before I was due to appear before this
board, the Army changed its strategy, opting instead to discharge me
administratively, typifying my failure to divulge answers on my application as
“misconduct.” This route allowed me only
notice and a chance to submit a rebuttal.
It deprived me of the greater due process I would have had in the
medical board proceeding. Both my
counsel and I were outraged. We mounted
a legal defense in which we attempted to obtain a restraining order from the civilian
court in Washington, D.C., on the basis that to change the
discharge procedure at this point would be to deny me the due process to which
I was formerly entitled. I lost and was
discharged forthwith, albeit honorably.
It was after
this odyssey, in 1992, that I struck out anew.
I relocated to a “cabin in the woods” 25 miles outside of Santa Fe and 3 miles up a
dirt road. Having endured the travails I
encountered while in the Army, I was looking for a new life. This period was a time of self-exploration
during which I re-discovered a spiritual inner tradition. Without belaboring the point, here I embarked
on a quest that began with an Islamic Sufi tradition. I had proceeded from Islamic Sufism to a more
universal interpretation of Sufism to Idries Shah’s books and to an esoteric tradition
from Abkhazia in the Caucasus mountains known as Ahmusta Kebzeh preserved by a
master of this way named Murat Yagan, who lives in Vancouver, B.C. The incubative/ illuminative time that I
spent on this track eventually led me to the works of Ken Wilber, the
publication, ReVision, and finally to beginning a course of study at CIIS in
1998.
Explication
Since my time at CIIS I have tried to proceed with my
self-explorations. Putting lawyerly
ambitions aside, I went overseas in 1995 to teach English. I first went to Korea
and in 1997 to Australia,
then Turkey and then on to Saudi Arabia. I have been continually trying to incorporate
the many parts of me. I got married for
the first time in April 1998, relocating again in Korea and eventually relocating
back to the states just over a year ago.
Armed with a lifetime of writing, playing the piano, and a series of
seemingly unconnected endeavors, I have been trying to gather my disparate self
into some manageable and functionally successful whole. I have taken the analytical skills and writing
skills that I honed in law school, and the lessons learned in the military, and
have tried to direct them all toward what I have I learned and am learning in
life.
Since beginning
at CIIS, I have studied and written my papers with a view toward integrating my
varied experiences. In order to do this,
I have sought to take my thoughts, feelings, beliefs and judgments and express
the phenomena upon which they are based into some sort of “comprehensive
depiction of the core or dominant themes...”[17] This is one step along the way of the
heuristic enterprise.
The
representation of these efforts can be gleaned from the papers I have written
while at CIIS, plus my collected writings put together in a manuscript form
entitled Stubby and Grizzly.[18] I had written those CIIS papers with a view
toward integrating them in my final dissertation. Thus it is that my previous writings remain
relevant.
Creative Synthesis
In my
dissertation, or at least in my dissertation proposal, I am hoping that who and
what I am might emerge from this lifetime odyssey. It is at the Ph.D. level, after an intense
two years of applying myself toward this integration, that I believe there has
resulted a synthesis of the big question behind my life’s work: that the integration of transformative
experiences are made explicit through one’s ability to articulate them as a
whole. And while I might be an
inconsistent exercising, fat, meditative/chant-a-phobe who is overly attached
to his alcohol-caffeine-nicotine-food excesses, still I have a driving sense of
developing my own self-knowledge. My
frailties are a part of my overall human condition, dissociative and hopeful,
attained and deficient, successful and failed.
Yet I go on and will continue to go on doing my best to feel my way forward,
in spite of myself and knowing how little or how much I have accomplished,
while taking refuge in the fact of my trying, always trying to be and become
more than I am self-informed that I am.
At CIIS I have
come to know the value of community life, however distanced I may feel from
it. And over recent years I have come to
know a more socialized sense of how to relate to my fellow human beings. I was born in 1954, and it wasn’t until 1986
(at age 32) that I had my first white collar job as a clerk in a law firm;
until then I had always tried to stay out of the mainstream, opting for the
life of a blues musician and blue collar roofing mechanic. With my successive bootstrapping to something
new and hopefully more complex, I hope that I have developed myself further and
have evolved according to what my maximum potential as a human being might
be. I recall other life forms that
compose the bio-sphere of the planet – and indeed, the planet itself! – and
recognize the need to identify with all of life, and not to categorize it in a
hierarchical way, nor to ignore the seemingly lifeless physio-sphere in our
midst. I acknowledge and accept the
techno-modernism of the age and try to grok the contemporary noospheric scene,
however overwhelming it can seem. If I
can create some sort of synthesis from all of this, based upon my explication
of it, I might consider myself true to the heuristic process to the very end.
Closure-ing
I began this paper with a sensitivity toward all
readers. I want all those who read this
paper to understand its contents. Big
words can be as intimidating as language can be confining. I hope that I succeeded in compassionately
relating to the reader while imparting my understanding of the heuristic
research methodology and how I believe I unwittingly came to use it. My stories here are very personal ones which
I rarely share. Through relating them, I
have tried to demonstrate that cycles of heuristic knowing through action and
reflection tend toward the developing of a fluid self-identity and an integral
mind-set. I am the living exemplar of my
process – to know me to any degree is to know the degree of self-knowledge I
hope that I embody. That is, I am the
results of my own heuristic inquiries.
Such results cannot be quantified, really. The results are qualitatively expressed
through the modeling of one’s own behavior and example in society. That, I believe, has enormous repercussions
in the world. By boldly going one’s own
way, in loving kindness but without “idiot compassion,” people take note, your
presence is felt, an impact is made.
There is absolutely no need for didactic proselytizing of any sort. But there is a constant calling to humility,
to an understanding that we are only the instruments through which an ineffable
power, if stimulated and given a chance, might come forth. Human beings are capable of being gods in the
world, or more precisely, of being the vessels from which godliness may shine.
My motivation in writing about my prior mental health
history and Army fiasco were also prompted in part by providing a context for
what has situated the uncertain me at CIIS and in the world generally. It is now, as my course requirements are
finished and in this last paper before my dissertation, that I finally feel
safe in expressing my problematic background.
After my disorienting dilemmas I am still somewhat cautious about
revealing them to others. I still feel
that if these facts of my life are known, even the supposedly more open-minded
students and faculty at CIIS might discriminate against me for my “documented”
abnormative approach of perceiving, processing and dealing with myself and
others and the world. Unless one has
felt the feeling of people fearing you or has heard derogatory comments aimed
at your mental framework that cut one to the core and overwhelming marginalize,
there is no way to express how demoralizing it can be. One who has not been there can only imagine
what it might be like to be a Frankenstein.
Thus it is that I have come to empathize with all other marginalized
persons who are victimized by those who unconsciously and unthinkingly
subscribe to the dominant “Western” mental/rational paradigm, which is surely a
thinly veiled pathology, but one that a great many do not perceive.
Of all the
methodologies of which science has conceived, none can really replace a simple
loving touch applied to all that we do, as well as that which we refrain from
doing. In this mode, mention must be
made of humanist/scientist Paul Feyerabend, whose works Against Method[19]
and Conquest of Abundance [20]
present themselves as safe havens in a world gone mad in an unholy alliance of
materialism, nihilism and relativism, of both the scientific and the spiritual
varieties.
It is my hope
that in my dissertation I will be able to do a lit review of the bulk of the
books on my shelf. These are the books
-- some of which are mentioned herein, some of which remain unread -- that have
come into my experience, helping to influence and galvanize it. If my dissertation proposal becomes “maintaining
a fluid self-identity by way of a ceaseless transforming of one's life through
informed immersion,” it is the authors of these books who have instigated
an initial engagement and prompted a self-dialogue for me. It is also the students and faculty as
co-learners and that cage-of-a-world that have served as a soul-making
laboratory wherein we find that we are not alone. Neither are we alone in our self-experiencing
of that world. Though constrained by
language habits of our community that predispose certain choices of
interpretation, we still must dare to articulate in order to share, to risk
instigating others onward in their voyages of self-discovery.
I would like to
conclude with a passage taken from The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation [21]
by Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa) (1858-1939), one of the best-known
educated Indians of his time. As a
physician at the Pine Ridge Agency, Eastman “devoted his life to helping his
fellow Indians adapt to the white world while preserving the best of their own
culture.”[22] It is a poetic rendering of what most have
forgotten.
The worship of the “Great Mystery” was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. It was solitary, because they believed that He is nearer to us in solitude, and there were no priests authorized to come between a man and his Maker. None might exhort or confess or in any way meddle with the religious experience of another. Among us all men were created sons of God and stood erect, as conscious of their divinity. Our faith may not be formulated in creeds, nor forced upon any who were unwilling to receive it; hence there was no preaching, proselyting, nor persecution, neither were there any scoffers or atheists.
 |
| Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa) |
There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature. Being a natural man, the Indian was intensely poetical. He would deem it sacrilege to build a house for Him who may be met face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of primeval forest, or on the sunlit bosom of virgin prairies, upon dizzying spires and pinnacles of naked rock, and yonder in the jeweled vault of the night sky! He who enrobes himself in filmy veils of cloud, there on the rim of the visible world where our Great-Grandfather Sun kindles his evening camp-fire, He who rides upon the rigorous wind of the north, or breathes forth His spirit upon aromatic southern airs, whose war-canoe is launched upon majestic rivers and inland seas – He needs no lesser cathedral!That solitary communion with the Unseen which was the highest expression of our religious life is partly described in the word hambeday, literally “mysterious feeling,” which has been variously translated “fasting” and “dreaming.” It may better be interpreted as “consciousness of the divine.”[23]
[1] From Robert Heinlen’s, Stranger In A
Strange land meaning
to deeply grasp something with every fiber of our being.
[2] Wittgenstein
[3] Idries Shah, The Sufis
[4] Plato, The Republic
[5] Peter Lamborn Wilson, Escape From The
Nineteeth Century, The Shamanic Trace, p.72-142, NY:Autonomedia (1998)
[6] …meaning, “an individual’s (or any
organism’s) bio-development” -- not to be confused with “ontological,” the
adjectival form of “ontology” defined above as “the nature of reality or
being.”
[7] “[T]here is no substitute for experience,
none at all. All the other paraphernalia
of communication and knowledge – words, labels, concepts, symbols, theories,
formulas, sciences – all are useful only because people already knew them
experientially.” A. Maslow, The Psychology of Science, (New York: Harper
& Row, 1966, pp. 45-46)(quoted in Moustakas, infra, p.17)
[9] Clark Moustakas, Heuristic Research:
Design, Methodology, Application Newbury Park,
(California), London,
New Delhi: Sage
Publications (1990) p.17
[10] Id.
[11] See Moustakas, pp.27-32
[12] Id.
23
[13] See Moustakas, pp.16-27
[14] New York:
St. Martin’s Griffin
(1996,1998) pp. 142, 145, 212, 233-235
[15] The title of a book by William Craddock
(1971)
[16] Jack Mezirow’s term, borrowed from Education
For Perspective Transformation: Women’s Re-entry Programs in Community Colleges
(New York: Center for Adult Education, Teachers College, Columbia University,
1975); and, Perspective Transformation, (Studies in Adult Education,
1977, 9 (2), pp. 153-164.)
[17] Moustakas, 31:1990
[18] self-published (1996-1999)
[19] London:
Verso (1988)
[20] Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press,
Bert Terpstra, ed. (1999) (subtitled: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of
Being)
[21] Lincoln and London: University
of Nebraska Press, 1980
(orig. pub. 1911)
[22] Id.
(From the back cover of the book.)
[23] Id.
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